Visual movement impairs duration discrimination at short intervals

The classic advantage of audition over vision in time processing has been recently challenged by studies using continuously moving visual stimuli such as bouncing balls. Bouncing balls drive beat-based synchronisation better than static visual stimuli (flashes) and as efficiently as auditory ones (beeps). It is yet unknown how bouncing balls modulate performance in duration perception. Our previous study addressing this was inconclusive: there were no differences among bouncing balls, flashes, and beeps, but this could have been due to the fact that intervals were too long to allow sensitivity to modality (visual vs auditory). In this study, we conducted a first experiment to determine whether shorter intervals elicit cross-stimulus differences. We found that short (mean 157 ms) but not medium (326 ms) intervals made duration perception worse for bouncing balls compared with flashes and beeps. In a second experiment, we investigated whether the lower efficiency of bouncing balls was due to experimental confounds, lack of realism, or movement. We ruled out the experimental confounds and found support for the hypothesis that visual movement-be it continuous or discontinuous-impairs duration perception at short interval lengths. Therefore, unlike beat-based synchronisation, duration perception does not benefit from continuous visual movement, which may even have a detrimental effect at short intervals.